1) This is Dragon Ball and Wuxia: two very much inherently, fundamentally silly things.

Understood, but Gohan being a kid fighting for his life against full grown super powered evil bastards was never meant to be silly. It's earnest and tension filled. If this was young Goku we were talking about I might agree. Some very important context is being dropped.

The biggest truths aren't original. The truth is ketchup. It's Jim Belushi. Its job isn't to blow our minds. It's to be within reach."You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzky" - Michael Scott

Those are just children fighting other children, older looking children than what Gohan was meant to be which was 4-5. The Karate Kid remake had that as well but what it didn't have was Jackie Chan punching the other kids in the face. He instead "fought" in a way that he didn't harm them.

They're also Asian movies and probably of a different standard from Hollywood.

I can really see something like this happening in an American made movie in 2018.

Kunzait_83 wrote:. You want some kind of a live action DBZ fix, just go pop in A Chinese Tall Story or a Buddha's Palm movie or something along those lines. We don't necessarily NEED another movie of Sun Wukong flying around punching and blasting away alien invaders: people have already made that movie. Quite a few times now

A Chinese Tall Story...Heh...I worked on that movie. Sorta...Does doing the English subtitles on all the special features on the Hong Kong DVD count? Biggest redeeming thing on the movie itself is the music score from Joe Hisaishi.

DragonBallFoodie wrote:I always have hopes for a live-action DB (either TV/film series) to be done well.

Well, do you remember Dragon Ball Kai: Super Battle Stage? That could perhaps be the closest thing to a Dragon Ball live-action done more or well in a decent manner. I quite liked it, it used the original Yamamoto score in its background, sound effects, the costumes were excellent in detail and the cast in those costumes were really flexible.

It's like Super Sentai (Power Rangers) but in Dragon Ball mode.

Bullza wrote:The Karate Kid remake

Oh dear, God, that was a horrible remake. Maybe not as bad as Ghostbusters 2016 but still.

The most "live action" Dragon Ball should ever get is like, really high-quality CG, but it'd still have to be true to Tori's style (if you've ever seen The Peanuts Movie, that's an acceptable attempt at CGing a 2D comic with distinct art). You simply cannot do live action with this series. The character designs are so unique and well-executed that you would lose all sense of personality when converting it. They'd either compromise things for "realism"'s sake to the point of homogenization, or just look ridiculous because they're cartoons given dimensions and detail they were never built for.

And that's just aesthetics. Don't even get into the nightmare that would be squeezing the story of any of the series arcs into a ~2 hour format, nor whether they'd even start from the FIRST arc when they know that Z has all the biggest worldwide moneymaking stories. And then there's the problem of all the casting being different no matter WHAT the region is (and the new actors never comparing to the ones we've known for decades), the changes and censorship that would be guaranteed in a film made to appeal to so many markets, the music probably being replaced, and this is all disregarding that the people making the movie would ALSO have to be great filmmakers that know the source material's intended effects very well.

It's not a plausible thing that live-action Dragon Ball would ever get made in the first place, it's an even SMALLER chance that it would be any semblance of good, nor anything close to the source material. Evolution was terrible and the people who made it incompetent, but I guarantee that even if you'd put a GREAT team together it still wouldn't live up to the fantasy, or even necessarily be any good. The most you could get is like A Series of Unfortunate Event/Scott Pilgrim/Silent Hill 1 scenario where you have a kind-of-okay, competent-enough movie that isn't really everything the source material was, and which would still have people pining for a mythical "proper" version in the future which never comes.

It's kind of funny, with Dragonball Evolution, I didn't mind they had Goku going to school. I was thinking just have him be a bubbly kid who loves martial arts and I think it would have been ok. But I think the biggest issue was that they had him be more like Gohan then Goku. Gohan was the one with the doubts.

If they ever do make another Live action Dragon Ball, I think they should do something similar to the Path of Power, where they combined the first arc with the red ribbon army arc.

I don't wanna Dragon Ball in live action again. And I don't understand why people are so obsessed with the idea of it, anyway. We have a perfectly good adaption of Toriyama's source material in the anime, not the mention the several animated films, TV specials, OVA's and other animated material.

They tried to dip their toes into Dragon Ball in a live action setting and it didn't work. Just forget about the whole concept in general and move on.

Spoiler:View

Akira Toriyama wrote:My policy is to try and forget things once they’re over. Since if I don’t discard the old and focus on what’s new, I’ll overload my brain capacity. I still haven’t lived down going, “Who the heck is Tao Pai-pai?” that one time I was talking with Ei’ichiro Oda-kun. But the fact that there are still people reading the series after all this time… All I can say is; “thank you.” Really, that’s all.

Akira Toriyama wrote:Drawing Dragon Ball again reminded me of two things--how much I love it, and how much I never want to do it again.

Kunzait_83 wrote:And if you're upset because all this new material completely invalidates the tabletop RPG rulebook-sized statistical system and flowchart for the characters' "canonical Power Levels" that you'd been working on painstakingly for the last bunch of years now... well I don't think there's a kind, non-blunt way of saying this, but that's 100% entirely your own misguided fault for buying so deeply into all this nonsensical garbage in the first place. And that you also have IMMENSELY skewed and comically backwards priorities in what you think is most important and needed to make a good Dragon Ball story.

Zephyr wrote:Goodness, they wrote idiotic drivel in a children's cartoon meant to advertise toys!? Again!? For the ninetieth episode in a row!? Somebody stop the presses! We have to voice our concern over these Super important issues!

FortuneSSJ wrote:Doesn't matter who wins, people would still complain about power levels.

MR.Mark wrote:I can't wait for a future arc of Super where Roshi takes on a resurrected Raditz who achieved Ultra Instinct by watching Goku do it while he was in hell.

Kamiccolo9 wrote:Fair enough, I concede. Sean Schemmel probably has some kind of hidden talent. Maybe he is an expert at Minesweeper. You're right; calling him "talentless" wasn't fair.

The youtube clip that I also linked to (twice) featured a kid fighting grown adults.

GreatSaiyaJeff wrote:It's kind of funny, with Dragonball Evolution, I didn't mind they had Goku going to school. I was thinking just have him be a bubbly kid who loves martial arts and I think it would have been ok. But I think the biggest issue was that they had him be more like Gohan then Goku. Gohan was the one with the doubts.

Making Goku a high school student and not a wild mountain boy, in and of itself, was still absolutely an incredibly pointless, character-undermining alteration that never should have flown whatsoever.

People make it sound as if the ancient cliche of "a wild child who lived his whole life in the wilderness among the animals and had never seen civilization before finally venturing out into the modern world for the first time and geting into fish-out-of-water comedic hijinks" is somehow this incredibly original, outlandishly foreign concept that's NEVER been tackled outside of animation before and is something so utterly alien and unworkable that audiences would somehow have an impossible time accepting it in a live action movie... and that it somehow ISN'T something that's so old hat that practically hundreds of shitty mainstream family comedies of the last 30+ years haven't already ran it thoroughly into the ground.

Lord Beerus wrote:I don't wanna Dragon Ball in live action again. And I don't understand why people are so obsessed with the idea of it, anyway. We have a perfectly good adaption of Toriyama's source material in the anime, not the mention the several animated films, TV specials, OVA's and other animated material.

Like I said before a page back: people are obsessed with it because of the weird sense of "validation" that comes with a geek property they love getting the MCU/Avengers treatment and getting heaped with praise and attention in the mainstream. Like I said earlier, its the nerd equivalent of when a sports fan's favorite team wins the championship that season and they get a sad vicarious thrill out of the fact that "we won!" or whatnot. This exact same principal also applies to most of the people who keep an eagle-eyed watch on sales figures for the franchise and are fixated on whether or not it was the highest grossing in this or that category in any given year.

Most sane, rational people just have no reason to care about any of this shit whatsoever, and they're absolutely right not to.

And yes, the various DB anime material is and should be seen as MORE than plenty enough.

Lord Beerus wrote:They tried to dip their toes into Dragon Ball in a live action setting and it didn't work. Just forget about the whole concept in general and move on.

Once again, I'll repeat: its not that a live action Dragon Ball movie CAN'T work or is even a particularly unique challenge. Both the biggest argument for AND against it is the fact that there's already SO much out there in the Wuxia film landscape that's almost exactly like a live action Dragon Ball as it is, that it both simultaneously proves that its more than do-able AND that doing it at this stage would be fairly pointless and redundant. Just go and watch Zu Warriors or Holy Flame of the Martial World or Storm Riders or A Chinese Tall Story or Kung Fu Hustle or Tai Chi Zero or pretty much anything from the 80s starring Hsiao-Lao Lin (who often played characters that basically WERE kid Goku straight up), and you're pretty much effectively already there.

Hell, note the irony that several years back, FUNimation themselves went through a brief phase where they licensed and released a whole bunch of classic Shaw Bros. Wuxia films on DVD (including Shaolin Prince and both Bastard Swordsman films, to name but a few) that could just as effectively have been marketed as live action companion pieces to Dragon Ball.

Absolutely 1000% agreed though that people need to let it go and move on already.

Last edited by Kunzait_83 on Thu Nov 15, 2018 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.

Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.

Kunzait_83 wrote:The youtube clip that I also linked to (twice) featured a kid fighting grown adults.

It says it's not available. Still a Google search tells me that the actor was 13 years old, a teenager, in a Chinese made movie.

Gohan was 4 to 6 years old from the beginning of Z up to the Frieza saga. Less than a third to less than half of the age of the one in your video.

No American made movie in this day and age is going to have an "actor" of that age having seemingly intense battles with grown muscular adults where the little tyke would then get punched, kicked and stomped on. It would never ever happen.

Look at the Vegeta vs Gohan gif that I posted it and then try to imagine something like being done in a big budget Hollywood production? No chance.

Thank you! I was wondering the same thing. Even Dragon Ball Evolution was adapting Dragon Ball not DBZ albeit with Z flourishes.

I think Path to Power would make a good template for a live action film or even Curse of the Blood Rubies

I don't know if they could make live action work outside of the fighting so I think going the opposite route would be better. Just make the movie a continuation of the story. Do a simple recap at the beginning for the people not familiar with DB(Z/Super) and then make a story that takes place assuming you already know the franchise. I still think BoG would have worked alright in live action. Would have been a good way of bringing back DB and also made the whole retelling of BoG in Super make more sense. But most of all instead of retelling and changing a bunch of things while still trying to capture all the little things of DB they could do more of a action movie which I think would translate better to live action.

Since the MCU is largely what a lot of people have firmly planted in their heads for what they want some idealized, fantasy vision of a live action DB movie to be, I just want to remind people of some of the things fans were worried and complaining about the very concept of the MCU prior to it having taken off and become a reality:

"How are they going to reconcile a universe that is rooted in both sci fi AND magic and the supernatural at the same time? Its one thing to do that in a comic book, but mainstream audiences will NEVER accept a live action film universe that contains a series like Iron Man and a concept like Thor and Asgard existing in the same space! I mean standard military sci fi crossing over with obscure Norse myths? That's WAY too weird and esoteric for middle America to get on board with! Nothing like that has EVER been done before in a Hollywood movie!"

"How will studios expect average, casual, non-geek audiences to possibly keep up with so many byzantine, crisscrossing storylines and plot threads spanning multiple movie franchises? And capping it off with The Infinity Gauntlet? Its one thing for comic books to do that, but NOTHING like that has EVER been attempted before in a Hollywood blockbuster franchise! Too much money is at stake for such a risk!"

"Spider-Man and X-Men are the only Marvel properties anyone knows or cares about! And Marvel Studios doesn't have access to either! Who's gonna buy tickets to a bunch of 3rd string heroes who no one outside of a comic shop knows or cares about? Where's the name recognition in Thor, Dr. Strange, Vision, Black Widow, Ant-Man, or Guardians of the Galaxy? And a talking Raccoon? Who's best friend is a walking tree? And a magic-wielding mystic sorcerer flying around the same Manhattan inhabited by Stark Tech and a sentient android? No WAY will mainstream audiences take that seriously, or buy that something this out there can co-exist in the same universe as the more grounded Captain America and SHIELD! Its WAY too risky for ANY studio to attempt earnestly! Comic books are one thing, but this is live action! Audiences will NEVER accept it!"

"Black Panther is a VOLATILE can of racial worms that NO studio in their right mind wants to touch. A Black Panther movie in one form or another has been in development hell since the 90s: no studio wants to do it because everyone's afraid of pissing off and offending racist white southerners in middle America with the sight of an African nation more technologically and economically advanced than ours! It'll NEVER fly!"

I'm not making any of that up here: those were all VERY real concerns and arguments being made within comic book fandom all across the internet regarding the whole idea of the MCU when it was first being announced back in 2007, and also right after the first Iron Man had come out and performed well in 2008. I remember very well when most people back in the mid/late-2000s, during the lead up to the first few standalone movies and prior to the first Avengers movie, were fully expecting the whole MCU project to go down in flames as a colossal box office trainwreck and a massive overreach of trying to get mainstream audiences to "accept" the "weirdness" of the deeper corners of comic book nerd apocrypha.

Cut to 2018, where frat bros in singles bars across the country are spending time in between hitting on girls speculating among themselves as to how the 4th Avengers film is gonna end whilst idol worshiping Star-Lord, kids are dressing up as Ant-Man, Gamora, and Rocket Raccoon for Halloween, 14 year old girls are all collectively crushing over Thor and Loki, Captain America and Bucky are now the whole planet's favorite bromance, Dr. Strange and Thanos are household names that even random gym rats know of, Black Widow is being hailed as one of the premiere female action heroes of our time, Wakanda is now by far and away one of the biggest and most audience beloved box office draw of the 2010s, and the phrase "I Am Groot!" has entered the cultural lexicon.

The point being: something only seems impossible and undoable right up until the moment that somebody goes and actually does it. Only THEN suddenly do people start doing an about-face and act like "Well OF COURSE anyone could tell that this was obviously going to work all along!" and then begin shooting down the NEXT idea that seems way too out there and risky and difficult to ever possibly work while coming up with excuses for why the last one was an obvious sure thing the whole time.

And Dragon Ball has always had WAY more clear and hard evidence of its live action viability than most superhero properties did prior to the early 2000s, due to the fact that Dragon Ball's very creation was largely and heavily inspired by live action martial arts fantasy films of a specific type that have been getting made for literally as long as film has existed.

- We know that its more than possible to do Dragon Ball's style of high flying, fast-paced, whacked out crazy, hyper-frenetic, apocalyptically destructive, Chi Kung-powered martial arts throwdowns: plenty of live action martial arts fantasy films have been doing that for decades.

- We know that its certainly possible to seamlessly blend lighthearted, slapstick, goofy screwball comedy along with heavy, deadly-serious, violent, consequence-filled, high stakes drama within a martial arts narrative: more than plenty of live action martial arts fantasy films have also been doing THAT for countless decades.

- We know that its plenty possible for Dragon Ball's various character archetypes to be handled properly in live action: countless martial arts films have been making use of those for a hundred years.

- We know its possible to translate the sort of mythical fantasy ancient Chinese Kung Fu setting with monsters and ancient demons and futuristic sci fi setting filled with robots and aliens that marks Dragon Ball's universe: both of those have been done countless times in live action movies for decades.

- And contrary to what some in here have been claiming, its certainly do-able to find a couple of talented children (within probably the 10 to 13-ish range) to play convincingly skilled Kung Fu fighters in a martial arts fantasy movie. That's also been done well before, and Gohan certainly doesn't NEED to be portrayed strictly as a 5 year old in a live action DBZ film to sufficiently get the point of the character across.

Western superhero movies only started finding their footing as a broader genre and started being done "properly" on a more widespread basis since around 2000 or so, for the past 18 years or thereabouts. Wuxia/Martial arts fantasy, of even the most whacked out, over the top gonzo insane sort, has been getting pumped out on the regular from China (and with more than plenty of great successes and outright classics among the crap) since at least 1929 or so. So roughly around 90s years as of this time. If anything, there are Chinese filmmakers out there who've had WAY more actual practice at making something very much along the same lines as Dragon Ball in live action than the American Hollywood filmmakers who are currently making Avengers sequels and spinoffs.

Once again, I'm not arguing that I'm in any which way chomping at the bit for a live action DB film: I think that if anything, what I'm talking about here shows all the more how COMPLETELY unnecessary, redundant, and altogether pointless of an exercise it'd be at this stage. The time to have done it properly was back in the early 90s at the absolute height of Dragon Ball's popularity and creative output, as well as at the height of the post-modern, genre-blending style of martial arts fantasy that it was riding the popular wave of.

My point is simply that it isn't the tremendously insurmountable challenge of uncharted filmmaking territory that so many people here are making it out to be (largely out of ignorance and inexperience with this sort of stuff outside of Dragon Ball and a few other stray examples). Its plenty do-able, and indeed has been done a whole bunch since decades ago: the real question is, why even bother at this point in 2018? What could anyone possibly get out of it now, other than the aforementioned vicarious, sports fan-like "My team gets to be 'It' this year!" dopamine rush that seems to be at the heart of all these discussions about it?

Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.

Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.

ABED wrote:Being done and being done well are two different things. Have the films you've mentioned had anything that looked like Cell and looked good? What about Buu?

Cell is basically a large mutant insect-person. That concept's been done plenty (quite well even) in horror and monster movies, even in pre-CGI times and with FAR less humanoid-looking designs than Cell's.

Exhibit A

Boo's a whole different story: that's a pretty damn unique Toriyama-original design, but I don't see it being outright impossible to accomplish with some good CGI work. Freeza and Cell you could probably pull off with a very talented makeup effects artist (one's an alien, the other's an insectoid mutant: both time-honored B movie staples) and maybe just CG for things like their tails: but Boo would almost certainly have to be a 100% CGI creation for sure.

Nonetheless, nothing about any of these specific characters presents some sort of insurmountable, unfilmable obstacle for a movie that has some amount of budget and talent put into it.

Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.

Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.

Brundle fly (that is the brundlefly isn't it? It's been 20 years since I saw that movie) isn't a great example as it's very limited and is on screen for a VERY brief amount of time and doesn't do a whole lot, and is also not in the light of day. Cell needs to move well and be seen in daylight. It's not impossible, but it's a difficult task.

That said, I'm with you. I'm not nor have I ever had a pressing desire to see DB in live action. Part of it's appeal is its cartoony-ness.

The biggest truths aren't original. The truth is ketchup. It's Jim Belushi. Its job isn't to blow our minds. It's to be within reach."You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Wayne Gretzky" - Michael Scott